Try to think of it this way. Long long ago, humans interacted by directly bartering goods and services.
Then someone had an odd idea. They used a precious substance (metals like gold, pretty seashells, etc) as an intermediate commodity. It allowed you to barter your goods or services with someone who lacked what you needed directly.
The value of the precious substance was equated to the cost of producing it relative to the goods and services bartered for. So you could spend your time producing food, clothing, etc, or producing this commodity that facilitated commerce.
Next, governments got into the business of minting coins, and punishing forgers. This only makes sense when the value placed on the money for commerce is significantly higher than the cost of producing the money.
Next we substituted cheaper metals and finally paper, but kept the good stuff in a vault to "back" the money used in commerce.
Next we ditched the gold in the vaults.
Now we could actually ditch the copper and nickel coins and paper money, and just do it with electrons.
This is called a monetary system.
All I'm trying to propose, is that a "metamonetary" system might be an excellent means of addressing issues which we currently argue over in other ways. The monetary system has allowed economic activity to have temporal spans greatly exceeding human lifespans, as well as transcending individuals or groups.
To extend it to every aspect of human activity (i.e. monetarizing humanity) is indeed a big chore and I don't claim to have even 1% of it figured out. People are nibbling around the edges of this idea. Things like pollution trading between power plants (to maximise $ spent for pollution control) as well as carbon bonds between polluters and carbon sequestering. The latter is being set up in a market based manner IIRC. The temporal span does not need to be limited to immediate production/sequestering. It could span many years. The next step in such a system it to deal with uncertainty, i.e. a hedge capability. The next step after that is to deal with the uncertainty of the action itself. Was it "good" or "bad". Which way should the funds flow? This latter step is a continually evolving answer determined by the future as it occurs. Don't think of it as legal "enforcement". I'm trying to get rid of regulation and enforcement, and supercede it with a mechanism that takes the rancor out of most issues. |
